Ponder the ramifications of this if you will. I’m going to start a power company in Ira. I will source a year’s worth of the projected power required from a dam set up on a currently dry drainage that comes down off Herrick Mountain.

I am quite sure that we will get one good storm this year which will create a torrent that when harnessed for a day will meet our power needs for the year. We will keep track of the power produced and in essence pay forward the cost of power that we require from the grid for the rest of the year. You might question if the torrent of power that we produce on that day will actually get used.

Nope. Our grid manager wasn’t completely sure this power was coming and thus didn’t scale back the big base load producers of energy. This doesn’t matter to me; my power company will take the credit for this unused energy and use that credit to keep Ira’s lights on for the rest of the year. Who pays for energy we used over the rest of the year? Not Ira. We have a credit. You know who pays — everybody else.

Did you know that common sense and legal precedent don’t allow other generators to get away with this type of operation? Hydro-Quebec couldn’t. Vermont Yankee couldn’t. They have to be available 24/7/365 to sell their power into the market. They are required to be reliable, forecastable and stable. Then there is industrial wind, which works just like my sham of a dam up on Herrick. Wildly unstable, variable and inefficient, but for some ratepayer ripoff of a reason, regardless of the time of day or the need for energy, always first to sell power that won’t get used into the market. If you can’t trust a wind turbine enough to shut down the other generators, you are not using the wind. Crazy? You bet, but we’re destroying mountains and neighbors’ lives for this debacle.